Elon Musk And His Software Company

Elon Musk and his software company

Introduction

In 1995, Elon Musk, his brother Kimbal Musk and a mutual friend, Gregory Kouri, founded, with a capital of 28.000 dollars, a software company that provided a business directory service with maps and images, which was called ZIP2. In other words, the company can be described as one of the first attempts to present a web version of the yellow phone pages, with maps included to easily locate business. This idea was extremely revolutionary for the time, since it implemented notions of web geolocation when the Internet was not even everyday for most world.

To develop his idea, Elon Musk acquired a floppy. With these two materials he develops an algorithm capable of crossing the two databases: business lists and maps. They invested two years trying to convince possible investors to implement their newly developed business mapping software. Elon described the applicability of the program through its ability to easily and graph the favorite business of those who need them.

Developing

Something that today is indispensable for any smartphone user and computers connected to the Internet. The first company that invested in Zip2 was Mohr Davidow Ventures with three million dollars in exchange for most of the company’s shares. In addition, Elon Musk was replaced with CEO with more experience, Richard Sorkin, but remained as executive vice president and technology head. Once ZIP2 was financed, his first big clients were the renowned newspapers: The New York Times and Chicago Tribune.

Thanks to that, images and entertainment guide were quickly implemented in the mapping program.

In addition to specific directories to search for different business categories. In 1998 the new CEO of Zip2 tried to merge the company with Citysearch, which provided a similar service, but Musk prevented it by organizing a revolt that was able to convince the directive to replace Sorkin with Derek Proud. However, by 1999, Zip2 was sold to Compaq Computer Corp. For 307 million dollars to integrate mapping software into the Altavista search engine. Elon received 22 million dollars for seven percent of his shares. With this money the foundation of its next company undertook that same year, which would continue at the forefront of web development. 

We refer x.com The foundation of what we know today as Paypal. Musk conceived x.com As the future of electronic banking and invested ten million dollars for its creation. The following year, specifically in March 2000, X.com melted with another company, Confinity, which was its direct competence and had a digital money transfer service called PayPal. Once merged the two companies focused on that money transfer service to using email as an identifier. At the beginning the CEO was Elon Musk, which had most of the actions.

But in September 2000 he was replaced by the co -founder of Confinity, Peter Thiel, due to differences with the company’s directive, since Musk had intentions to migrate the PayPal infrastructure from Unix to Microsoft Windows. In 2001 the company focused so much on its money web transfer service that was called PayPal and in October 2002 it was bought by the EBAY electronic store for 1.5 billion dollars, of which Elon Musk received 165 million dollars of dollarsFor being the one with the greatest amount of shares, a total of 11.7%. THANKS THIS Multimillionaire Gain.

conclusion

Elon was able to take his next great step and thus fulfill his dream of ensuring the survival of the human being, how would he do it? Well, the first thing that occurred to him was to make space flights more viable and economically when founding Spacex, but that is a story for the next chapter. However, despite Elon Musk’s recent successes in the creation of reusable electric vehicles and rockets, he has not forgotten his origins and how much his second company gave him, X.com, that’s why in 2017 he bought the web domain from the page to PayPal.

Claiming on his Twitter account: "That he has great sentimental value". Until the sun of today the website does not have a relevant purpose, beyond showing an "x" on its home screen. The safest thing is that the web domain did not come out economical, but after all Elon can buy everything he wants thanks to his large coffers of money, including expensive web pages that may never use more than to satisfy his desire to possess it.